November 22, 1963
The Death of a President, the Death of Trust
As the motorcade rolls past cheering crowds, Nellie Connally can’t help but feel a mixture of pride and relief. Several people advised the president against traveling to Dallas. Hostile crowds spat on Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy’s ambassador to the UN, during his visit last month. The Civil Rights movement has made Texas politics especially volatile and Dallas is notorious for its fierce conservatism. But Governor Connally’s wife has been pleasantly surprised by the warm welcome they have received so far.
“Mr. President,” Nellie says to Kennedy, “they can’t make you believe now that there are not some in Dallas who love you and appreciate you, can they?”
The president grins as the motorcade continues through downtown Dallas.
“No. They sure can’t.”
At first the crowd believes a motorcycle has backfired or somebody has thrown a firecracker. Then comes a second shot. Kennedy grabs for his throat and slumps. Governor Connally spins in his seat, his shirt blossoming red.
The third shot tears through the president’s skull. Abraham Zapruder flinches behind his movie camera as Kennedy’s head explodes. Jackie Kennedy screams.
“I have his brains in my hand.”
CBS viewers are watching As The World Turns when Walter Cronkite interrupts the broadcast.
In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade, in downtown Dallas. The first reports say President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting…
Cronkite reaches out for another bulletin.
More details just arrived. These details about the same as previously. President Kennedy shot today just as his motorcade left downtown Dallas. Mrs. Kennedy jumped up and grabbed Mr. Kennedy. She called, ‘Oh no!’ The motorcade sped on. United Press International reports that the wounds perhaps could be fatal.[1]
The screen returns briefly to the soap opera. The actors, working live, have been performing this whole time. They have no idea that their broadcast was interrupted or that their president has been shot. Within a few minutes all three networks will be focused on the shooting. At 2:38 p.m. EST Walter Cronkite struggles to maintain his composure as he announces:
From Dallas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at one o’clock Central Standard Time—two o’clock Eastern Standard Time, some thirty-eight minutes ago. Vice President Lyndon Johnson has left the hospital. We don’t know to where he has proceeded. Presumably, he will be taking the oath of office and become the thirty-sixth president of the United States.[2]
At first, many police officers and civilians came from behind a picket fence atop a grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza. One witness reported seeing a “colored man” leaning out the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. Another witness reported that the shooter was a white man wearing khaki clothing.
About 30 minutes later, police officer J.D. Tippit spotted a suspicious man walking through Oak Cliff, a nearby residential area. He called the man to his patrol car. When Tippit left the vehicle, the man fired three shots into the chest, then a fourth in his temple. Around that time Roy Truly, a supervisor at the Depository, realized that one of his workers, Lee Harvey Oswald, was absent.
At 1:36 p.m., police were called concerning a man who had snuck into a Texas Theatre showing of War is Hell without paying. Oswald pulled a loaded gun when police arrived but was arrested after a brief struggle. When interrogated, Oswald insisted he was being made a “patsy” because he had lived in the Soviet Union.
At 6:10 p.m., after landing in Washington with Kennedy’s body, Johnson made his first public statement as president.
This is a sad time for all people. We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed. For me, it is a deep personal tragedy. I know that the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear. I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help—and God’s.[3]
That evening, doctors at Bethesda Naval Hospital performed an autopsy. The death certificate listed the cause of death as a gunshot wound to the skull. Conducted under difficult circumstances and extraordinary time pressure, the autopsy report lacked critical details about the bullet entry and exit wounds. These oversights would later prove a wellspring for many of the JFK conspiracy theories that followed.
While the nation mourned, many security officials worried. A year earlier, the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the world to the brink of a global thermonuclear war. Now the president had been shot by a Soviet defector who had returned to the US with his Soviet-born wife. If this assassination was part of a Soviet plot—or if enough Americans believed it was—the consequences could be catastrophic.
At 11:21 a.m. CST on Sunday, November 24, Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald once in the abdomen at close range while police were transferring him from the city jail to the county jail. Less than two hours later, Oswald died at Parkland Memorial Hospital—the same hospital where Kennedy had been pronounced dead two days earlier.
The crowd outside Dallas police headquarters cheered when Oswald was shot. As the euphoria faded, many Americans realized that now Kennedy’s accused assassin would never testify in court. We would never learn whether he had accomplices or what foreign powers, if any, might have been involved. Some wondered if Oswald had been killed to prevent a catastrophic international confrontation. Others wondered if he had been killed to cover one up.
Five days after Oswald’s death, Johnson announced that a committee headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren would investigate the JFK assassination. The Warren Commission was created thanks in part to the work of Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, who argued “The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large.”
But while Katzenbach hoped the report would put conspiracy theories to rest, the 888-page Warren Commission Report released on September 24, 1964 failed to do so. For many Americans, it raised more questions than it answered.
The Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone; that Jack Ruby had killed Oswald without assistance from the Dallas Police Department or any other conspirators; that no foreign government or federal, state, or local official were part of any conspiracy to aid and abet Oswald or Ruby. They also stated that the bullet which went into Kennedy’s upper back and through his throat went on to hit Governor Connally, a claim that would be dismissed by critics as the “magic bullet theory.”
A few months before the Warren Commission Report, Thomas G. Buchanan released Who Killed Kennedy? Blackballed in US journalism because of a youthful dalliance with Communism, Buchanan moved to France in 1961, where he worked as a freelance journalist. L’Express was so impressed by his analysis of inconsistencies in the official JFK assassination reports that it sent him to Dallas to cover the Ruby trial. During his homecoming visit, he met with Katzenbach and with another Warren Commission staff member.
In his L’Express articles, Buchanan argued that Jack Ruby knew Oswald and had loaned him money to repay the repatriation loan he incurred after returning from the Soviet Union. He further argued that the assassination had been financed by a right-wing Texas oilman, carried out by two gunmen, and that Oswald knew of the conspiracy but was not one of the shooters.
While Who Killed Kennedy? was popular in Europe among left-leaning intellectuals, it attracted relatively little attention in the United States. But it found a small but devoted readership among early critics of the Warren Report. These new scholars were passionately interested in the assassination and convinced that Kennedy’s death was caused not by a lone gunman but by a political conspiracy.
The day after Kennedy’s assassination, Life publisher C.D. Jackson offered Abraham Zapruder $150,000 for all print and motion-picture rights to his 8mm silent film. His intention was not to make the film public immediately, but to protect Jacqueline Kennedy’s privacy. The film showed the president’s head exploding and his widow grasping desperately for pieces of his skull. Jackson wanted to keep the film under wraps because he felt these images were not suitable for public consumption. Few in 1963 would have disagreed with his decision.
Later critics would attribute less savory motives to Jackson’s decision. While he released individual frames to various publications, Frame 313—the image showing the fatal bullet strike Kennedy’s head—remained unavailable. Later some Warren Commission skeptics argued that Kennedy’s head jerks backward as he is hit. This, they claimed, proved that JFK was shot from the front by a second shooter who was not in the Depository.
But skeptics were not the only people who looked askance at Time Inc.’s ownership. On June 28, 1967, Walter Cronkite criticized Time, Inc. at the end of a four-part series on the Warren Commission report:
Abraham’s Zapruder’s film of the actual assassination…is now the private property of Life magazine. A Life executive refused CBS News permission to show you that film at any price, on the ground that it is, quote, “an invaluable asset of Time, Inc.” unquote…We believe that the Zapruder film is an invaluable asset, not of Time, Inc., but of the people of the United States.[4]
While Cronkite was chastising Time Inc., New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison was continuing his own investigation into the Kennedy assassination. Questions that had hitherto been asked by journalists, writers, and independent researchers were now being pursued by a prominent prosecutor. On March 1, 1967 he charged Clay Shaw with conspiring to assassinate John F. Kennedy with the help of Lee Harvey Oswald, David Ferrie, Guy Banister, and several other co-conspirators.
Five days after Garrison’s investigation made the papers, Ferrie was found dead in his home. The coroner said he had died of a brain aneurysm. Garrison declared Ferrie’s death was suicide but refused to rule out murder. Garrison’s aide, Lou Ivon, claimed that Ferrie called him after the story broke and said “You know what this news story does to me, don’t you? I’m a dead man.”[5]
Banister, a former FBI agent, had ties to anti-Communist Cuban forces and allegedly supplied weapons to the soldiers of the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. On the afternoon of the Kennedy assassination, Banister pistol-whipped one of his employees, Jack Martin, after an argument. In December 1977, Martin told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that Banister attacked him after he said “What are you going to do—kill me like you all did Kennedy?”[6]
Clay Shaw’s trial began on February 6, 1969. On March 1, the jury retired. Less than an hour later, they returned with a not guilty verdict. James Kirkwood, a personal friend of Shaw, reported that jury foreman Sidney Hebert told him: “I didn’t think too much of the Warren Report either until the trial. Now I think a lot more of it than I did before.”[7] Garrison stated in his book On the Trail of Assassins:
While the jury accepted my argument that there had been a conspiracy, it was not then aware of Shaw’s role as a clandestine C.I.A. operative. Unconvinced of his motivation, the jury acquitted him of the charges.[8]
On April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer. On July 2, 1881, James Garfield was shot by Charles Guiteau, a madman. On September 6, 1901, William McKinley was shot by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist. Those assassinations shocked and horrified the nation, but those killers could be understood.
With Lee Harvey Oswald’s death, his motivations became an eternal mystery. He would never tell us what drove him to Dealey Plaza and who else, if anyone, was involved. The Warren Commission Report hoped to soothe that nagging unease by declaring Oswald the sole actor and the lone gunman. Many Americans welcomed that relief and accepted the conclusions. We were a more trusting society then. We might be skeptical about individual politicians, but we still found it hard to imagine that our government would lie about a presidential assassination.
Jim Garrison could not convince a jury that JFK was killed by conspirators. After Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers, and the Watergate scandal we found it easier to believe that Kennedy was killed by shadowy forces who were later protected by the government that he once led. In 1976 and 2001, Gallup polls found that 81 percent of Americans believed Oswald did not act alone. In 2023 those numbers had dropped to 65 percent.[9] Six decades after its release, a majority of Americans still do not accept the conclusions of the Warren Commission Report.
After Kennedy’s death, his brief reign came to be looked upon as a golden age. People named his time in office after one of Kennedy’s favorite Broadway musicals. They called it Camelot. His assassination marked the beginning of our long journey toward a world that had difficulty imagining golden ages. Camelot died with Kennedy. Westeros arose out of the ashes.
[1] Vincent Bugliosi, Four Days in November. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. E-book.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Lyndon B. Johnson, “Remarks Upon Arrival at Andrews Air Force Base” (November 22, 1963) at The American Presidency Project. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-upon-arrival-andrews-air-force-base-0.
[4] “Transcript of CBS News Inquiry: ‘The Warren Report’: Part IV” (PDF). Harold Weisberg Archive. June 28, 1967. p. 12. http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/C%20Disk/CBS-TV%20News%20Special%20Part%204/Item%2001.pdf.
[5] Jim Garrison. On the Trail of the Assassins. New York: Sheridan Square Press. p. 138.
[6] House Select Committee Assassination Report, Volume X Sect. XII. 544 Camp Street and Related Events. (December 1977). 130.
[7] James Kirkwood. American Grotesque: An Account of the Clay Shaw-Jim Garrison-Kennedy Assassination Trial in New Orleans. New York: Harper, 1992. 511.
[8] Garrison, xii.
[9] Megan Brenan, “Decades Later, Most Americans Doubt Lone Gunman Killed JFK.” (2003). Gallup, https://news.gallup.com/poll/514310/decades-later-americans-doubt-lone-gunman-killed-jfk.aspx.